Mona Chalabi “Why do Americans write the month before the day?” http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2013/dec/16/why-do-americans-write-the-month-before-the-day
「何故米国人は日付の前に月を書くのか」。その理由はわからないようだ（笑）*1。
ところで、endiannessという概念を知る。曰く、
This condition is diagnosed as middle-endianness. Seriously. It comes from computer science where bytes are arranged according to their size. If the order has larger ones at the front, it's known as big-endian and so too are dates formatted with the years first (see the likes of China and Mongolia in the map above).Even more bizarrely, computer scientists got their inspiration for the term 'endianness' from Jonathan Swift's 1726 epic Gulliver’s Travels*2. In the fictional kingdom of Lilliput people have to open their soft-boiled eggs at the small end (it's a royal decree). While in Blefuscu, eggs are cracked from the other end. Lilliputians are small-endians while Blefuscudians are big-endians. Again, seriously.
Jonathan Swift, like the computer scientists, was basically saying that systems are needed to organise even the most irrelevant seeming of things. As Danny Cohen*3 writes "Swift's point is that the difference between breaking the egg at the little-end and breaking it at the big-end is trivial… but we insist that everyone must do it in the same way, to avoid anarchy. Since the difference is trivial we may choose either way, but a decision must be made."
- 作者: スウィフト,Jonathan Swift,平井正穂
- 出版社/メーカー: 岩波書店
- 発売日: 1980/10/16
- メディア: 文庫
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*1:他にも米国人の振る舞いや嗜好については何故なのかわからないことが多いという。
*2:Jonathan Swift was mentioned in http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20050824 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20091208/1260270282 http://d.hatena.ne.jp/sumita-m/20101121/1290313201
*3:Danny Cohen “On Holy Wars and Plea for Peace” http://www.ietf.org/rfc/ien/ien137.txt
*4:http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2013/12/15/1387125445310/ef1bbe42-0bdb-414c-af40-6d5d1856b379-460x313.png
*5:印度や南アフリカでは、日→月→年と年→月→日。またカナダは年→月→日も日→月→年も米国式の月→日→年も見られるようだ。
